Canonization of the Royal Family
From the archives of the (Indiana) Orthodox E-mail List:
...The only reason that honest and thoughtful people still have any misconceptions about the Royal Family, its life, its reign and its martyrdom is plain ignorance resulting from deception by the media and "historians" on both sides of what used to be the Iron Curtain.
The words Philip once said to Nathanael still apply to our Information Age: Come and see.
From The Three Romes by Dr. R. DesRosiers, University of New Hampshire
The question of the canonization of Orthodox Emperors has in the year of 1981 assumed very great importance... The Emperor-Martyr Nicholas II stands at the head of this vast number of Russians whose Orthodoxy was tested victoriously even unto death. Today the prospective canonization of Nicholas II not only has provoked the contemptuous protests of the godless and the worldly, but has even scandalized many of the faithful Orthodox Christians, especially American converts, who find themselves only able to view this glorious event suspiciously through glasses distorted by the prejudices of both modern times and national anti-monarchist perceptions.
One hears even among sincerely Orthodox Christians the most ridiculous objections to the Emperor's canonization, to the effect that throughout his life he smoked, and that in his youth he had lived luxuriously.
[It is unfortunate to the extreme that the slander of a publicity-hungry woman was not left to lie dormant in her memoirs and that an otherwise excellent biography of the Emperor Nicholas II and his family in the English language has chosen to mention at length the supposed love affair between the Csarevich and the ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska. (R.K.Masse, Nicholas and Alexandra, Atheneum. NY,1967,pp.20-26)... It should be noted that the only source of this slander is the ballerina herself, hardly a credible witness.]...
A more serious and cynical protest insists that the canonization of the Emperor-Martyr is a travesty, elevating to the religious sphere a simple act of political revolution and murder. In answer to such an un-historical outlook, let us cite what we have already written... The Csar's title ... was understood in cold-blooded clarity by the assassins themselves on July 4/17, 1918, the black day of the murder of Russia's Imperial Family.
For all the shame and guilt which the Russian nation must shoulder in the treacherous abandonment of the Orthodox Emperor, the actual responsibility for the murder itself is not theirs, since the killers were neither Russians nor Christians.
[...For an English account of the enigmatic scrawlings and the two lines in German from Heinrich Heine, cf. A.Summers and T.Mangold, The File on the Tsar, Fontana, Collins, Glasgow, 1976, pp.75-77]. The cabbalistic scrawlings in the cellar at Ekaterinburg bear witness to the Emperor's primary role as an Orthodox Christian ruler.
...It is incorrect to view sanctity in the Orthodox Church as the exclusive preserve of the private, the ascetical, and the unworldly, set in a simple and unvarying context of struggle after the pattern of the Desert Fathers. It is also wrong to judge the sanctity of the Emperor-Martyr by comparing his life, act for act, prayer for prayer, podvig for podvig, quantitatively and qualitatively, with such greater ascetics as St. Anthony of Egypt or St. Seraphim of Sarov. Rather, Nicholas II must be compared to the multitude of Martyrs and Passion-Bearers, whose death in itself furnishes the proof and the substance of their sanctity. He also must be compared to the royal Saints, such as we attempted to present and describe. When such comparisons are made, the Csar-Martyr and his August Family emerge triumphant, with indisputable claim to our veneration, such as the Holy Orthodox Church, true to Her Tradition even in the anti-monarchist atmosphere of our times, is not ashamed to acknowledge.
